Category Archives: Official Announcements

Concourse Hotel Weekend Information

May 24, 2021 commsadmin Leave a comment

First of all, there are still PLENTY of discounted rooms available for our weekend meetup at the Concourse Hotel! Click here to make a reservation.

The hotel has set up a meeting space for us in the Madison Ballroom (better known to WisCon members as the Dealers Room) on the second floor. We will have a big screen for viewing this weekend’s Visioning WisCon online content, as well as tables and chairs for holding our own spontaneous conversations. The room will be open starting at noon on Friday and will be available through Sunday night.

Masks are required in the meeting space and 6-foot distancing should be practiced wherever possible. Please avoid bringing in food or drink.

Lastly, Madison locals, day trippers, and friends & family are all welcome to come! The in-person meetup is not an official WisCon event and there is no registration. If you will be participating in Visioning WisCon, we ask you to please register separately (see our other posts for more details).

We are looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible!

Official Announcements, Uncategorized

The Otherwise Auction? In MY Visioning WisCon?

May 23, 2021 commsadmin Leave a comment

It’s more likely than you think.

Unless you knew already that the Otherwise Award was born at a WisCon, lo those many years ago! (In 1991, which is thirty, more or less! Don’t come for my math.) In that case, maybe it’s more of a happy reveal than an actual surprise.

The Otherwise Auction supports the Otherwise Award, and it’s always a good time — famed Otherwise auctioneer Sumana Harihareswara will be reprising her role. As Otherwise Award Motherboard member Pat Murphy says:

Last year, Sumana’s online auction was amazing, compelling, and impossible to describe. I’m a science fiction writer; I should be able to describe just about anything. But somehow Sumana managed to auction off things that didn’t actually exist but were (despite that) real. It was one of those “you had to be there” events — even though none of us were actually there.

This year Sumana promises that there will actually be some physical things that people can buy and possess — along with a custom crossword puzzle with Otherwise-related clues. Just a few tangible objects and a lot of intangible fun — which seems appropriate as we slowly ease back into the physical world.

Unlike last year, we’ll be using actual money for this auction. (If you have no idea what we’re talking about, ignore this whole paragraph! You never saw us, we were never here.)

The auction will start at 7pm Central on Saturday night (5/29), and will end when Sumana says it’s over. We’re really excited to have a chance to support the Otherwise Award, even without an in-person convention this year, and to have fun doing it!

Official Announcements, Uncategorized

Visioning one of our 2022 Guests of Honor

May 22, 2021 commsadmin Leave a comment

Are you anticipating the return to an in-person WisCon as much as we are? This Memorial Day weekend, you can get a sneak preview of one of WisCon’s four (4!) amazing 2022 Guests of Honor!*

Just for us, Zen Cho will be recording a reading and more with the help of Dave Ring. Come get super-stoked (do people still get stoked? Is that still a thing? It’s clear from context, right?) — it’s our 7pm Central event on Sunday (5/30)!

*You can read more about Zen Cho and the other three guests we have lined up for 2022 here on WisCon’s website.

Official Announcements

Viddinging WisCon!

May 21, 2021 commsadmin 2 Comments

Okay, that was funnier and/or punnier in my head, sorry.

Even though we aren’t having a convention in the Madison Concourse Hotel this year, we’ve got the technology, and we can share feelings from afar — experiencing WisCon’s 11th Vid Show, but: online!

The Vid Show will be Visioning WisCon’s closing event, and we’ve cleared out three hours just in case everyone’s feelings overflow like some sort of bubblebath-related mishap, except with more neurotransmitters and zero heavy perfumes. Do we have enough vids for three hours? Do we have enough opinions and thoughts for three hours? HAVE YOU LITERALLY EVER MET ANY OF US? (Maybe you haven’t! Maybe all of your WisCons so far have been virtual and you only lurked! That’s totally legit, but trust me: yes, we could do it on opinions alone.) It’s kicking off at 8pm Central time on Sunday night (5/30), and winding down around 11pm.

For the uninitiated, “vids” are fan-made remix videos with something to say. As is usual for the WisCon Vid Show, there will be subtitled vids, a sing-along portion, and short shows on various themes.

The big difference this year is that since we’ll be using Kumospace, you can chat to your neighbor by voice or text within the convention space WITHOUT bothering anyone else and accidentally making a life-long nemesis! More details soon on how that will all work (making screenshots: so boring, so necessary), so stay tuned.

In the meantime, whether you miss hanging out in a darkened hotel room watching vids with your friends or you’ve never been able to make it in the past, join us — we hope you’re as excited to watch some curated vids as we are!

Email Newsletter, Official Announcements

Announcing Visioning WisCon: a very low-key virtual event

May 8, 2021 commsadmin 3 Comments

HOW DID IT GET TO BE MAY ALREADY.

This spring (unlike last spring) has gone fast, but we’ve found the time to be sad about the lack of a WisCon this year as much as we have been hearing you are missing it. But we looked at our energy levels (sadly low) and our virtual-event-expertise levels (also pretty low), and we had to conclude that we weren’t going to be able to do a second WisCONline.

BUT! We heard from lots of you, and you said you miss lobby-con, where folks usually get to relax and chat with other con-goers, and bar-con, where folks get to relax and chat with other con-goers, except more dimly lit and with a drink.

Well. We DO have the energy and expertise for that! We’re setting up a group video chat space, complete with a bar (virtual) and a pool (also virtual) and sofas (you guessed it: virtual), and we would love it if you can join us there on Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend!

BUT WAIT. There’s more! We’ll have spontaneous programming, and, less spontaneously, discussions of what the future of WisCon should look like. And even less spontaneously, we will be hosting a few of WisCon’s familiar special events — including the Otherwise Auction!

Come meet up with the folks you miss seeing at the con in person, hold a spontaneous panel, attend an event or two, and help us to use some of this time to talk about where WisCon has been and where we should be headed. Our platform does support real-time captioning when accessed using a Chrome browser and is keyboard-navigable.

We’ll have blog posts (nearly) every day between now and Memorial Day weekend, to share more details about how to attend, how to spin up a spontaneous program, the event schedules, and to lay some groundwork for discussing the future of WisCon.

We wanted to get this announcement out before more time slipped away, so you can make plans! (Apologies that this is so late; in my defense, time is fake and jobs are the worst.)

We will be asking folks to register, so we can send you the information you need to attend. Our base membership price is FREE! Memberships priced at $10 help us make the next in-person convention happen; $60 memberships go to our Member Assistance Fund, helping folks attend in 2022; the $200 memberships help assure that WisCon can keep happening past 2022. The program space will be open 4pm to 11pm Central time, Saturday May 29 & Sunday May 30.

Stay tuned for more details, and in the meantime, register here!

Official Announcements

Spend Memorial Day weekend at the Concourse Hotel

April 9, 2021 Kit Stubbs, SF3 Treasurer 2 Comments

As you know, we’re not able to hold a WisCon in Madison this spring. However! The Concourse Hotel, the longtime home of WisCon, is running a special promotion for members and friends of the WisCon community over Memorial Day weekend, May 27-31, 2021. The promotion includes:

$99/night for Concourse Premier Guestrooms for up to 4 nights (Thursday-Sunday)
$8 overnight parking
Discounts at the hotel restaurant for overnight guests
A public space for Gathering, spontaneous discussion, and hanging out with other folks who miss WisCon, following all local guidelines for health and safety.

The Concourse hosted its first WisCon in 1984 and has been our full-time hotel partner since 1995. They are an independently owned and operated hotel and as such have been hit especially hard by the loss of business during the pandemic. This is a fantastic chance to support them, get away from home for the weekend and see some friends in a clean, well-ventilated, socially distant environment.

To make reservations, use this promo code: https://reservations.travelclick.com/6388?groupID=3222387 or call 800-356-8293 and mention WisCon.

The Concourse Hotel’s health and safety plan can be found at https://www.concoursehotel.com/coronavirus (click through for a link to a PDF for the complete list of policies).

For the most up to date information on the Madison & Dane County Public Health guidelines, please visit https://publichealthmdc.com/coronavirus/forward-dane/current-order.

Keep an eye out for an update all about virtual WisCon activities Memorial Day weekend!

Official Announcements, WisCon 45 in 2022

Our Guests of Honor for WisCon 2022

January 25, 2021 Kit Stubbs, SF3 Treasurer 1 Comment

At WisCon in 2022 we are honoring four amazing authors: Rebecca Roanhorse and Yoon Ha Lee, who were originally invited to attend WisCon 44 in 2020; as well as Sheree Renée Thomas and Zen Cho, who were originally invited to attend WisCon in 2021.

We are thrilled to confirm that Sheree Renée Thomas will be attending WisCon 2022 in person and will also be available to participate in virtual programming. Due to family commitments and the ongoing pandemic, neither Zen Cho nor Yoon Ha Lee will be able to participate either physically or virtually in WisCon 2022. We have yet to receive confirmation whether Rebecca Roanhorse will be able to participate virtually (for the second time) or physically.

WisCon Guests of Honor are chosen by, and often from within, our own community, and we will honor that choice by continuing to celebrate all of these amazing authors during WisCon 2022.

Below you can learn more about each of our Guests of Honor:

Zen Cho

Zen Cho is the author of the Sorcerer to the Crown novels and a novella, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, as well as the short story collection Spirits Abroad (joint winner of the 2015 Crawford Fantasy Award). She is a Hugo, Crawford and British Fantasy Award winner, and a finalist for the Locus and Astounding Awards. She edited the anthology Cyberpunk: Malaysia, and won a 2019 Hugo for her short piece “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again”. She was a juror for the Speculative Literature Foundation 2014 Diverse Writers and Diverse Worlds grants, served on the Board of Con or Bust and has been a SFWA mentor for emerging writers. She was born and raised in Malaysia, resides in the UK, and lives in a notional space between the two. She is a past WisCon attendee. Connect with Zen Cho on her website, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter.

Yoon Ha Lee

Yoon Ha Lee’s debut novel from Solaris Books, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards. Its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were also Hugo finalists. His middle grade space opera Dragon Pearl won the Locus Award for best YA novel and was a New York Times bestseller. Yoon’s short fiction has appeared in publications such as F&SF, Tor.com, and Clarkesworld Magazine, as well as several year’s best anthologies. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators. Connect with Yoon Ha Lee on his website or Twitter.

Rebecca Roanhorse

Rebecca Roanhorse is a New York Times bestselling and Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning speculative fiction writer and the recipient of the 2018 Astounding (Campbell) Award for Best New Writer. Rebecca has published multiple award-winning short stories and five novels, including two in The Sixth World Series, Star Wars: Resistance Reborn, Race to the Sun for the Rick Riordan imprint, and her latest novel, the epic fantasy Black Sun. She has also written for Marvel Comics and for television, and had projects optioned by Amazon Studios, Netflix, and Paramount TV. She lives with her husband, daughter and dogs in Northern New Mexico. Connect with Rebecca Roanhorse on her website or Twitter.

Sheree Renée Thomas

Sheree Renée Thomas creates art inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and conjure, and the genius culture created in the Mississippi Delta. She is the author of Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, May 26, 2020), her first fiction collection. She is also the author of two multigenre/hybrid collections, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, longlisted for the 2016 Otherwise Award and Shotgun Lullabies (Aqueduct Press), described as a “revelatory work like Jean Toomer’s Cane.” She edited the two-time World Fantasy Award-winning volumes, Dark Matter, that first introduced W.E.B. Du Bois’s work as science fiction and was the first black author to be honored with the World Fantasy Award since its inception in 1975. Her work is widely anthologized and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received honorable mention in the Year’s Best volumes. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times and other publications.She serves as the Associate Editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora (Illinois State University, Normal). She lives in Memphis, Tennessee and is a past WisCon attendee. Connect with Sheree Renée Thomas on her website, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Official Announcements, WisCon 45

Con Status Update, January 2021

January 8, 2021 Kit Stubbs, SF3 Treasurer 2 Comments

What’s the latest news on WisCon 45 in 2021?
We’ve decided to not have an in-person WisCon in 2021 due to the ongoing pandemic. Some vaccines are starting to become available, but there will not be widespread distribution with enough lead time for us to reasonably plan a convention.

What about our Guests of Honor?
Zen Cho, Sheree Renée Thomas, Yoon Ha Lee, and Rebecca Roanhorse have agreed to be Guests of Honor in 2022. We look forward to honoring them in person when we can finally all have a WisCon together again!

What will happen instead?
Firstly, we are in the process of planning a much smaller in-person event to occur at the Concourse Hotel in May in order to fulfill the contract we signed with them. This would look something like an intensive workshop event, rather than a convention, and the Workshops department has been looking into how it could work. The number of attendees would also be vastly reduced, in compliance with whatever guidance Public Health Madison & Dane County has in place at the time. We’ll be talking again with the Concourse Hotel this month and probably again later to revisit these plans.

If we can find current or former ConCom members to co-chair, we’d like to plan another WisCONline to occur in 2021. If you’re a current or former ConCom member with the time and energy to help us organize WisCONline, please contact the SF3 Board at board@sf3.org .

What about registrations?
If you registered to attend WisCon in 2021, you’ll receive an email in the near future regarding a refund. You can use this form to tell us whether you would like a refund or whether you would like to donate the money to WisCon; the form will be open until Monday, February 8, at 11:59pm US Central time. If you fill out the form, you can expect either a refund or a donation thanks email within 7-10 days after filling it out. If you don’t fill out the form, a refund will be issued 7-10 days after we close the form.

Registration for WisCONline and the small in-person May 2021 event at the Concourse are not open at this time. We’ll be in touch when they are.

Email Newsletter, Official Announcements, SF3, WisCon 45

SF3 Annual Meeting October 18, 2020

September 30, 2020 Kit Stubbs, SF3 Treasurer Leave a comment

As many of you know, SF3—the Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science Fiction—is the parent organization for the WisCon convention. The SF3 board engages in long-term planning and recruitment for WisCon, as well as pursuing activities unrelated to the convention.

The 2020 SF3 Annual Meeting is coming up on Sunday, October 18, at 1PM Central Time. This meeting is entirely virtual! Information on joining will be sent to all current SF3 members a few days before the meeting.

If you’re interested in the future of WisCon and SF3, or in our evolving plans for 2021 in light of the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic, we encourage you to become an SF3 member and attend the Annual Meeting. Annual membership is $24, or $12 at our student/financial hardship rate, which we encourage anyone to use as needed. We take payment by PayPal or check, though if you plan to pay by check we ask that you email treasurer@sf3.org to let us know it’s on the way. The deadline for joining SF3 in advance of the Annual Meeting is Wednesday, October 14.

We know this is a busy and difficult time for many of you. We hope the WisCon and SF3 community can be a source of support in these times, and it is with that in mind that we hope some of you will join us on October 18. If you have questions or concerns that you’d like to bring to the SF3 board, but you aren’t able to attend the Annual Meeting, please feel free to contact the board by email at board@sf3.org.

Official Announcements, WisCon 45

Meet our Guests of Honor for WisCon 45 in 2021: Sheree Renée Thomas & Zen Cho!

July 19, 2020 Kit Stubbs, SF3 Treasurer 1 Comment

As we announced at WisCon in May 2020, we are thrilled to have Sheree Renée Thomas and Zen Cho as our Guests of Honor for WisCon 45 in 2021!

Official Announcements

Ways to the WisCon ConCom, or to find out more!

June 16, 2020 Kit Stubbs, SF3 Treasurer Leave a comment

The time after the con ends is often the quietest for the WisCon organizing committee (the ConCom) but we’re still starting to look towards our next convention in May 2021, when we hope we’ll return to Madison and the Concourse hotel for WisCon 45.

Like many conventions, WisCon is 100% fan run. None of the events at the convention would be possible without the generosity of some of our members volunteering their time throughout the year to make it happen!

To keep the organization of WisCon sustainable, we’re always looking for new people who are willing to get involved. If that’s something that interests you—or even if you’re just curious about how the ConCom operates!—we’d like to invite you to join us for the post-convention ConCom meeting, which will take place via conference call on Saturday June 20 at 1PM Central (Madison local time, GMT-5). Email volunteers@wiscon.net for information on joining the meeting.

As we said in an email at the end of WisCon, the ConCom often undergoes some reorganization over the summer, but some of the WisCon departments that are definitely looking for new volunteers are Access, the Consuite, Gaming, our Safety department, and the Workshops programming department.

In general, some ConCom roles are primarily busy during the year, before the convention, while others are busiest during the convention itself. You can find out more about volunteering on the ConCom at http://wiscon.net/volunteer/concom/, but you can also email volunteers@wiscon.net if you’re interested in volunteering but aren’t quite sure what role would work best for you!

Our parent organization SF3—the Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science Fiction—is also looking for people interested in joining its Communications committee, which handles communications for WisCon as well as for SF3 more broadly.

The SF3 board will also be electing new officers for the Vice President and Treasurer positions at its annual meeting in Fall 2020; if you are interested in standing for either of those positions, you can contact president@sf3.org, or visit www.sf3.org to learn more.

And if you’re interested in seeing how the ConCom functions but can’t make it to the meeting on June 20, send us an email and we’ll let you know once our first Fall meeting in September is scheduled.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Official Announcements, WisCon 44

WisCONline Update: Platforms + Volunteers

May 18, 2020 Registration Lead Leave a comment

The excitement is intensifying for WisCon 44 next weekend! We’re looking forward to seeing you all there, whether you’re new to WisCon entirely or just new to WisCONline (as we all are).

The ‘How To’s of WisCONline

We’ve gotten some questions about how you’ll access virtual WisCon 44 programming.

Invitations to the WisCon Discord server will be sent out to the email you gave when you registered, on the evening of Wednesday May 20 (after registration closes at 7PM). If you don’t receive an invitation that evening, please check your spam filter, and then contact registration@wiscon.net and we can send you a new link!

Most of WisCon’s programming will be streamed to YouTube, but available only via direct link (it will not show up on the WisCon channel or via searches). The links to specific program items will be sent out by email each morning, and also posted in the Discord server. (If you do not plan to join the Discord server, it is therefore particularly important that you make sure that you are able to receive emails we send out!)

Some of the WisCon special events—the Otherwise auction, the Vid Party, and the Floomp—may use other platforms. Information on joining these events will be sent out in the same emails as the links for watching streams on YouTube, and will also be posted to Discord.

More information on how the platforms and specific program items will work for WisCon 44 are available on our website; we’ll continue to update and expand what’s posted there between now and the convention.

WisCONline is looking for volunteers!

To make the convention happen every year, WisCon depends on its many volunteers. The virtual convention is no exception, even though the volunteer roles we’re looking to fill are different than they would be in person.

Technical Producers will coordinate the backend of program items, whether for live Panels or for pre-recorded Readings or Academic Programming items. If you’re comfortable with technical tools, and especially if you have experience with YouTube Studio, this is a great way to get involved!

Online Chat Moderators will monitor the conversation for live panels on Discord, and pass comments and questions onto the panelists via the Technical Producer.

Social Media Monitors will keep an eye on other web platforms for any issues arising in the current panel’s hashtag, and will escalate them to Safety if necessary.

And as at in-person conventions, Safety Volunteers will be available during programming hours, as a first point of contact for concerns or issues as they arise.

There’s no volunteer rebate or gift this year, but anyone who signs up for a volunteer shift by 5PM Central on Tuesday will receive an early invitation to the Discord server!

Full descriptions of all these roles can be found on our At-Con Volunteers page, or you can head directly to SignUp.com to sign up for specific shifts. If you have questions, or have any issues using the SignUp interface, you can also email volunteers@wiscon.net.